


On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies

by forthegreatergood



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Bickering, Cuddling & Snuggling, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, First Kiss, First Time, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, Hand Jobs, M/M, Post-Eden, Pregnancy, Sex Education, Sexual Content, Two halves of a whole idiot, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:00:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24020974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: After Eden, an angel and a demon are left to figurea few thingseverything out for themselves.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 186





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Content note on the pregnancy tag: Eve is pregnant, and it comes up fairly frequently. Nothing graphic, but better tagged than surprised.
> 
> * * *
> 
> All characters property of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the respective production and licensing companies.
> 
> Not beta-read. Any mistakes are solely the author's and, if pointed out, will get an "lol, damn, I sure did." before being immediately forgotten because I'm no longer sure what day it is.

Crowley skipped a stone off the pool’s surface and watched as the ripples it created collided with the light ruffling kicked up by a stiff, sudden breeze. Such a lovely spring, surrounded by such a lovely bunch of plants--it was probably some of his best work yet, by his own metrics. Head office was liable to have a different view of it, but so far they hadn’t cropped up to tell him about it, and he wasn’t about to head Downstairs and ask. 

He stretched his wings, brushing the tips of them over the drooping palm fronds, and frowned thoughtfully at the ferns. He’d a mind to scatter the whole blessed desert with oases, but maybe they’d be better with something the humans could eat. They’d stick around longer, too, if they didn’t have hunger pushing them on.

What was it they’d been told? By the sweat of their brow? Wouldn’t get any farther up Her nose than letting them go for a nice swim and then just pick their supper like they had before She’d tossed them out on their ear, would it? Properly… Crowley lifted his hand to his mouth and chewed on his thumbnail. It wasn’t even disobedient, was it--not now that he didn’t have any real orders. No point in rebelling against radio silence. 

Not that Crowley’d ever really seen the point of disobeying orders just to disobey orders. Doing something simply because someone had told him not to do it had the same aftertaste as doing something simply because someone had told him to do it--neither one had much of anything to do with what _he_ wanted to do. But the mood Satan was in at the moment, whatever She wanted, he’d only be pleased with an effort to do the direct opposite.

So, the next oasis would very definitely be edible, with an absolute minimum effort required on the humans’ part to fill their bellies. What else had the pronouncement been? Crowley reached for another stone. Probably should have been taking notes instead of standing around like an idiot, fish-mouthed and gawping. No telling how it would go over Downstairs, Her turfing the whole lot of them out over humans only to turn around and turf the humans out after less than a year, just for eating something they weren’t supposed to. 

Crowley’d wanted to pitch a right fit over it, stomp out into the clearing and scream that She wasn’t _allowed_ to throw him away over humans and then get bored of them, too. It had to have meant something to Her, kicking them all out like that. It had to have been over something important. Satan’d probably just gloat over having ruined Her glorious plans, rub his taloned hands together and ask how She liked Her favored creations now.

The breeze died as suddenly as it had sprung up, and Crowley winced at the prim little “Oof!” in the dunes behind him. Principalities might have been created for battle, but they certainly hadn’t been meant as all-terrain vehicles, that was for blessed sure.

“Here--what was it Her Nibs said about the herbs of the field, when She was reading them the riot act?” Crowley asked, skipping the stone across the now-still pool. He smiled at the rings that rippled out from each of the four points before the rock sank into the clear water.

“Should you really be performing such frivolous miracles?” Aziraphale asked testily.

Crowley glanced back at him, raising his eyebrows. That pretty face was pinched like he’d just bitten into something unexpectedly sour, and Crowley turned back to the pool. It was going to be one of those days, apparently--clenched hands and a stamped foot and the world’s prissiest halfhearted attempt at banishment.

“I can perform as many miracles as I want,” Crowley said, putting as much snootiness into his tone as he could. 

It had always made him grit his teeth when the thrones did it, and the principality behind him was already in the mood to take offense. And who knew? It might even be true. So far, demons hadn’t proven much better at giving orders than they’d been at taking them, and his instructions had been perilously short on details like what he could requisition and whether he’d have reinforcements and the existence of an extraction plan. 

He looked over his shoulder, arching his eyebrows in what he hoped was a pitch-perfect imitation of that insolence Lucifer was absolutely oozing with these days. “Can’t you?”

Aziraphale drew himself up to his full height and stuck out his chin, blue eyes flashing. Crowley watched him, a genuine smile trying to curl his lips under the pretense. It was like the angel had sat down with an abacus and tallied up exactly how much of a pill his looks would let him get away with being.

“Heaven still has a sense of righteous order and proper place,” Aziraphale sniffed, wings tucking properly behind his back. Crowley let his hang loose against his shoulders, almost resting on his arms, and Aziraphale glared at him. “We don’t grasp for more than our lot.”

“Huh.” Crowley pretended to consider it, then picked up a stone. He only got two skips out of it, but it wasn’t like Aziraphale was going to be impressed either way. It certainly wasn’t as if he cared whether or not Aziraphale was impressed. “Sounds boring.”

“Ooh!” Aziraphale tossed his cloudsilk curls angrily and pursed his lips. “That wasn’t even a miracle!”

“Never said it was,” Crowley drawled, grinning.

“But you said--”

“I _said_ I can do as many as I want. You’re the one who forgot how physics work.” Crowley crossed his elbows over his knees and leaned forward. Satan, but the shade felt good in the middle of the day. No wonder the angel’d been making with the dark cloud over the humans when they couldn’t find shelter for themselves. 

He closed his eyes and miracled a soft breeze, pleasant as the wind from an angel’s beating wings, and Aziraphale huffed behind him. This would be the part where the angel informed him that Crowley had broken the terms of their agreement, and Crowley had to remind him that Aziraphale sticking his nose in the air and spelling out the terms under which Crowley was allowed to directly interact with the humans and Crowley laughing until his stomach hurt and telling him to get bent didn’t constitute coming to an agreement.

Aziraphale tsked and grumbled his way down to the oasis, all but stomped the sand out of his sandals, and then practically threw himself down at the edge of the pool. He glanced at Crowley out of the corner of his eye, then looked away again when he saw that Crowley’d noticed him doing it. Or maybe this would be the part where the angel pouted and sulked and tried to get Crowley to take back what he’d said about humanity getting forgiven. Crowley sighed and reached for a pouch on his belt.

He unhooked it, gave it a shake, and tossed it to Aziraphale, who caught it without looking. 

“What do you think?” he asked, jerking his chin at the little bag.

Aziraphale tugged at the string keeping it closed, his nose already wrinkling in preemptive disgust at its contents. The roast squash seeds rattled dryly against each other as he examined them. “They’re very… interesting.”

Crowley glared at him. “Did the assembly team forget your sense of smell? You eat them. Obviously.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “Unlike some people, I don’t investigate new things by cramming them right into my mouth.”

“That was one time,” Crowley snapped, glaring harder. He suspected it had been one of Her little jokes, making ostrich eggs so dense they might as well have been stone. Aziraphale’s politely horrified expression when he’d writhed his coils a bit and spit the rock back out like a tape ejected from a player had almost made the whole thing worth it, though. He’d honestly thought the angel might faint.

Aziraphale scoffed to himself, but took one of the seeds and lifted it to his lips. He chewed thoughtfully, the shell crunching between his teeth.

“It’s fine, I suppose,” he said finally, expression that telltale mix of beatific and condescending that made Crowley’s ears prick up. The bag had already disappeared into the folds of that white robe, and Crowley smirked.

“Well, if that’s the best you can say for it, I guess it’s back to the drawing board,” Crowley said, shaking his head ruefully. He stretched out his hand. “Give ‘em back, and I’ll dump ‘em someplace they can’t bother anybody.”

Aziraphale stiffened and gave him a wide-eyed look so artless Crowley almost burst out laughing.

“Give what back?” he asked, shoving his hands into his sleeves and looking behind him.

“The roast seeds,” Crowley said evenly.

“Didn’t I already…?” Aziraphale frowned and looked at the ground around him, all apologetic incompetence, and Crowley smiled. Satan, but that principality was going to be the death of him. “Well, I’m sure it will turn up eventually.”

“There it is,” he said, pointing. “Fell into your pocket, there.”

“So it has,” Aziraphale said softly. He drew it back out, fingers tightening around the cloth and he looked down at his lap. When he glanced back up, he was chewing his lip and there was a sheen to his eyes, whole visage a pretty, beseeching mask. “It’s just… You don’t understand!”

“That she’s hungry, and manna’s all well and good for filling bellies but doesn’t do a thing for cravings, and they don’t know why you can’t just fix it?” Crowley asked, tilting his head.

Aziraphale blinked at him, his face gone slack, then nodded and looked away.

“You could’ve just said,” Crowley told him, and Aziraphale’s cheeks colored.

“After I made such an ass of myself telling you that you weren’t to so much as breathe in their direction?” Aziraphale asked bitterly. He propped his elbow on his knee and let his forehead rest on the heel of his palm and stared morosely into the pool. “Just said, ‘Oh, thanks so much, Crowley, they’re lovely, I’m sure Eve will be tickled pink, she’s had the strangest love of salt lately!’?”

Crowley shrugged. “You really think I’d’ve tried to make you give it back?”

Aziraphale shrugged right back at him, and Crowley supposed he had it coming a bit. The angel had gotten so blessed angry with him for laughing, and he had, after all, only laughed harder.

“She really isn’t going to take them back, is She?” Aziraphale asked quietly.

Crowley spread his hands and grimaced, and Aziraphale blinked at him, realization slowly dawning.

“Ah.” He lowered his head and dug his fingers into his hair. “But it’s… it’s different, for them. They’re special. And.” He swallowed, and Crowley could practically hear him trying not to cry. “And they could--if they repent, then…”

He glanced up, his eyes pleading, and Crowley wondered if lying to one little principality would be so much worse than anything else he’d done. If his sins were already too great to ever merit forgiveness, if his treachery could never permit a return, then what did it matter if he whispered false hope in the ear of one so desperate to hear it?

“You didn’t get this from me, angel,” Crowley said, words heavy on his tongue, “but it’s not from lack of repenting that Hell’s standing room-only.”

Aziraphale looked at him, stricken, and then buried his face in his hands, wings drooping around his arms. The sharp little breaths and the shaking shoulders and the theatrically-muted sniffling that started up after a minute or two were, Crowley had to admit, an absolute virtuoso performance. Such a brave principality, trying to hide his distress at the thought of his humans never being forgiven. No need of comfort there, no sir, just another one of Her stoic soldiers positively not looking for a shoulder to cry on.

Crowley rolled his eyes. And he’d thought the seraphim should have come with user manuals. He pushed himself to his feet, tucked his wings away into the ether, and picked his way around the pool to sit down next to the angel. 

“There, there.” He patted Aziraphale awkwardly on the back, and suddenly Aziraphale’s face was squashed against his chest, arms around his neck, the bony joint of one deceptively delicate-looking wing jerking dangerously close to his ear as the angel began sobbing properly.

Crowley grimaced and hugged him gently while he cried. It felt good, having that warm body pressed close against his, feeling that comfort received doubling back against him. It felt better than good, being so close to a burning core of grace after so long without it. It felt unclean, slithering close to bask in it while Aziraphale wept with pain and sorrow.

“It’ll be all right, angel,” Crowley said after a while, when Aziraphale seemed close to spent. “It will. You’ll rotate out, someone else from your squad’ll take over for a bit, and you can get some rest.”

Aziraphale sat up and tugged his sleeve over the back of his wrist, then rubbed at his eyes with it. “What do you mean, someone else from my squad?”

“Your…” Crowley waved his hand. “Your squad, angel. The other nine principalities in your little--” He clicked his tongue. It hadn’t been his department, he’d only been passing through, and they’d been glad enough to see the back of him once he’d stopped worrying at them about what the Third Choir was going to look like. “--coterie? Clique?”

Aziraphale squinted at him, brows furrowing. “What in Heaven’s name are you babbling about?”

“Whatever it is you call a group of principalities,” Crowley groaned, surreptitiously miracling the front of his robe clean. Not that Aziraphale was as undignified as the average demon about the sniveling, even when he really got going. It was only that angel-tears probably stained, and Eve would narrow those clever dark eyes of hers and _ask_ , and then he’d have to _explain_ , and then it would turn into a _thing_. Easier just to skip the whole go-round. Crowley got to his feet and paced. “I’m not going to pretend I kept up with the terminology, after things started going south, and it was a while back anyway. Someone else from your _team_ will take over down here, and they can figure things out for a bit. Or, more sensibly, two or three other principalities can take over, and then they’ll have someone to… talk to…”

Crowley trailed off at the utterly bewildered look on Aziraphale’s face.

“I think you must be thinking of the rank and file,” Aziraphale said after a moment, fastidiously blotting at his eyes. “Principalities were created to lead, and to, ah, guard.” He forced a proud smile. “The unyielding watchtowers of Heaven.”

Crowley turned away with a sharp jerk of his shoulders before he could say anything else. It had been a long time ago. Everything had gone to shit, and then they’d all been on war footing, and there was no reason Heaven couldn’t have scrapped the earlier plans and knocked out a redesign. It would have been a squeaker, but he’d pulled bigger rabbits out of the odd singularity just to keep on schedule, never mind with ravening hordes kicking down the gates and making quality control and dark-matter ratios a distant concern. 

It was only that he couldn’t imagine a being like Aziraphale having ever been meant as something other than part of a chattering, preening, cheery flock that made him think they’d gone ahead with everything to spec and just issued different instructions for deployment once they were done.

Crowley ran his fingers through his hair and resisted the urge to look back at the poor lonely creature with his tear-stained face and the awful responsibility he’d taken on sitting heavy on his shoulders. Aziraphale most likely didn’t want his pity, and anyone still welcome in Heaven decidedly didn’t _need_ his pity. And really, what was this except one more of his stupid fucking questions, one of his _what if…?_ s, his _don’t you think…?_ s, his _how’s that fair…?_ s, no more welcome here than it had been in the throne room.

Aziraphale said he didn’t belong to a squad, and Aziraphale would know, just like Crowley had known it was bullshit to go halfsies on the whole desire-for-fellowship thing with powers. What She’d been thinking, sending them all out to make the stars and miss the others with a nagging ache at the back of their minds, only to get back from that and find Heaven too full and too much, he still didn’t know. Crowley snorted to himself. He was just projecting, wasn’t he? Easier to dump it all onto the nearest angel instead of looking at what he’d gotten himself into. Well, that was fair enough, wasn’t it? He’d gotten himself into a right mess.

He looked at the oasis and chewed his thumbnail, as absently surprised as ever not to taste star-stuff clinging to his hands. He’d gotten himself into a right mess, made a mockery and a waste of everything he’d been and done, everything that had given him meaning. And yet, there was beauty in his work, still. He could change it, too--do as he saw fit, no one’s blueprints to follow but his own. He could make it better, make it worse, make it different. He’d never been able to do that in Heaven.

Aziraphale got to his feet and cleared his throat, his expression contemplative when he followed Crowley’s gaze. Like he was imagining his charges resting here, drinking their fill, getting their strength back.

_Wait til you see the next one, angel._

“I should be getting back,” Aziraphale said quietly. “Thank you… for the seeds.”

“Thank you?” Crowley echoed archly. He snorted and rubbed his upper lip to cover his smile. It was like Aziraphale was incapable of being anything but painfully sincere in his gratitude. “I don’t remember giving you anything.”

“Er.” Aziraphale’s face puckered in confusion, then cleared. “Ah! Yes.” He coughed and flared his wings, the brightness of them dazzling. “Let that be a lesson to you, foul fiend. I shall confiscate anything I need to in order to thwart your wiles most, ah, thwartingly.”

“Don’t strain anything there, angel,” Crowley said, smirking.

Aziraphale flushed, and Crowley couldn’t help but let his gaze trace every contour of that lovely face. Maybe he had been barking up the wrong tree, after all--there’d be no surviving a whole flock of Aziraphales.

“You know what I meant,” Aziraphale muttered, spreading his wings in a less theatrical and more utilitarian fashion. Crowley almost wanted to ruffle his feathers. “See you around?”

“Ehn. Not like there’s anything better on at the moment, is there?” Crowley gave him a little wave, then watched him fly away.

He turned back to the pool, rubbing his chin. Maybe something with berries. He could hide them under the ferns, and they could feel clever and proud when they looked up from drinking and saw the fruit there, waiting for them to pick it. Eve had been wanting for sweet almost as much as she’d been wanting for salt lately, holding her belly and looking askance at it every time Adam wasn’t paying attention.

“It’s so hungry,” she’d whispered one morning, when he’d slipped into the shelter with her. Adam had been sick of following Aziraphale’s lead and decided to see what lay at the foot of the range nearby, and Aziraphale had gone flapping after him to keep the bad idea from killing him.

“So are you,” Crowley had pointed out. He’d felt it was a sensible thing to say, an assurance that the thing she’d birth was the same as her. He’d understood the other powers a lot better than he’d ever understood the virtues; Eve’s child would be just as comprehensible to Eve as Adam was.

“No, it’s got…” She’d shaken her head. “Its appetites aren’t mine. It’s hungry in a different way than I am.”

“Oh.” Crowley’d had nothing for that. “Guess it’ll keep things interesting, at least?”

“What if it doesn’t want to stay? What if it leaves?”

Crowley’d had nothing for that, either. He’d wanted to brush it aside, sure that with a whole whopping three humans around, they’d want to stick together, but there were piles and piles of animals that took off and never looked back the second they were weaned, and he didn’t know that humans weren’t one more of them. He wasn’t even, strictly speaking, all that clear on how it was getting out of her belly.

“Will you follow it, if it runs away?” She’d given him that look that reminded him of who exactly was responsible for their current predicament and let him know she wasn’t about to forget it.

“Surely Aziraphale…?”

But no--not Aziraphale. His duty, self-imposed though it might be, was to humanity. He might want very much to chase after the errant chick, but he would stay with the nest, protect the mated pair. Guard the future at the expense of the present.

“If I can.”

If he could. If Hell hadn’t found some other use for him by then, or drawn him up short just to remind him that he’d traded one kingdom for another. It had been such a weak promise, with all its implied caveats and conditions, but it had made her happier. Probably not as happy as berries would, though.

Crowley slithered forward, trading skin and cloth for scales, slipped into the pool, and got to work.

* * *

“It’s not that I’m not grateful,” Aziraphale grumbled, hands on his hips and lips pursed as he inspected the latest oasis, “but really, my dear--did it have to be _bananas_?”

Crowley paused, fingers dug into the earth where the foliage began to peter out, and took a deep breath. Barely a month--that was all it had taken for Aziraphale to go from stealing to his side at night, a fervent _thank you_ whispered in his ear with the sort of relief that could shatter mountains, to this. 

He tried not to think of what it had been to wake up to the rustle of those wings, the smell of petrichor and jasmine rolling off those ethereal feathers, the angel’s breath on his skin. He tried not to think of how he’d woken in the morning hard enough to hurt, had rolled over and brought himself off under the cover of his plants, face shoved in the crook of one arm so he didn’t have to admit what it was he was doing, why he was doing it. It was almost a relief, this petty criticism flung at him from a safe distance.

“It’s not that I’m not grateful for the feedback,” he said sourly, digging his hands in deeper, “but really, angel--don’t you have something better to be doing right now?”

“No.” Aziraphale turned away, and there was something in that flat, petulant _no_ that pricked at Crowley’s curiosity.

He should ignore it. He knew he should. He had work to do. Her will wasn’t going to thwart itself. Aziraphale’s tender feelings could sort themselves out for once; he was a demon, not a… a… whatever the heaven it was Aziraphale even needed.

 _A minder_ , the tired, peevish voice in the back of his mind suggested. He felt a twinge of guilt at that, then quashed it angrily. He’d been a power, once. He’d made the stars. And here he was, grubbing around in the fucking dirt like a beetle, with a holier-than-thou principality who’d only ever soiled his daisy-petal hands with other angels’ blood carping about his work. Blessed fucking idiot, turning his back on an angel who’d have just as happily gutted him during the War. If things had shaken out just a little differently, Aziraphale’d have that dainty foot on his throat just as soon as look at him.

Crowley sat back on his haunches and looked up at the gathering twilight above them. He’d given up all that, gotten cast into Hell, just to sit here and get bossed by yet another fucking angel. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It felt good, letting the anger course through him. It felt right, certain, _convincing_. If he worked himself up enough, he’d even forget that no one had asked him to do any of this, and he could stop any time he wanted to go catch up with Hell instead, and Aziraphale would very probably leave and not come back if he told him to.

“What about making sure this whole blessed thing isn’t rendered pointless by a single hungry lion?” Crowley asked instead, miracling himself clean and getting to his feet.

He needed a nap, and a little less of Aziraphale’s miffed, pouty frowning, and a few more assurances that this was even going to work. 

Crowley had started off just putting his oases wherever struck his fancy, and then Aziraphale had pointed out--with that fluttering of his hands and that winsome little stammer in his voice--that there really was only so far Eve could walk in a day with her growing belly, and it had suddenly occurred to Crowley that there wasn’t much of a point to making them if the humans couldn’t get to them, and after that he hadn’t been making oases--he’d been making fucking _human sanctuaries_. He’d been _responsible_ for them.

Last week, Aziraphale had asked where they were going with the most trusting, imbecilic look on his face, and Crowley had suddenly understood what it was about spaniels that made people want to kick them.

_Where are we going?_

Fucking Satan, what a wonderful question. Where _were_ they going? Where was Crowley, idiot gardener of this brave new world, actually leading his irreplaceable little expedition? He didn’t even like plants, and here he was, demonically replicating Eden in tiny chunks on the road to who the fuck knew where. If he’d known this was where he’d wind up, he’d have spent a bit more time listening to the Botanics teams and a bit less time backing away slowly when they explained how things like ballistic seed dispersal and mycorrhizal networks were going to work with too many smiles on their faces and halos about ready to go supernova.

I used to make stars, he thought, and scrubbed at his face. He’d used to make stars, and he was very proud of them, but if he budged one up because the power on the next system over had gotten the scale wrong or cut corners to make a deadline or went a little overboard with the nitrogen here and there, practically nobody was going to notice and it wasn’t likely to put anyone out and certainly nobody was going to fucking _die_.

Aziraphale made a face and tucked his wings close against his back. 

“They’ve got the sword,” he said, and oh, Crowley knew that tone. He wanted to laugh at how well he knew that tone.

This wasn’t about him at all. The angel’d gotten told off about something, and it was either go sulk on some barren dune or come here and find a way to shift the blame.

“Their lessons on how to use it coming right along, then?” Crowley asked brightly.

Aziraphale glowered at him.

“Look, angel, just go apologize for whatever it is you did, hover at a slightly greater distance than you were, and--”

“ _I_ didn’t do anything,” Aziraphale snapped, crossing his arms and glowering more pointedly. “It was you! You and those,” he paused, lips puckered like he was getting ready to spit out a seed, “those _damned_ bananas!”

“What the heaven could a bunch of bananas have done to get your feathers this fluffed?”

Aziraphale’s cheeks turned pink, and he looked away. “You know exactly what they did.”

“Filled the humans’ bellies? Made them happy? Gave them a boost of energy?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale’s head snapped back around, eyes narrowing. “Ooh! You did it on purpose--I _knew_ you did!”

“Sure did,” Crowley agreed, heading for a deeper patch of shade. If he couldn’t see the stars, maybe he’d wish himself back there slightly less. Was there an Astronomics department in Hell yet? Maybe he could pop back down and check, see if he could pull some strings and get a reassignment. He could make a constellation illustrating something properly rude, or get some systems all tangled up in a way that would have physicists tearing their hair out when they finally spotted them. “Demonic wiles--that’s me. All day, every day.”

“Yes, and I understand that,” Aziraphale said. He inhaled sharply, the way he did right before he launched into one of his school-marm, vaguely-apologetic-but-no-backtalk lectures, and Crowley barely stopped himself from groaning aloud. 

Satan’s sake, how had he wound up with an internal catalog of principality noises? Maybe they’d taken what was supposed to have been ten angels and wedged them all into one being, and it had turned out just like it had with the horses--stupefyingly effective killing machines, sure, but absolute nervous wrecks the second they weren’t being asked to murder anything. 

Crowley regarded Aziraphale in profile. It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? Ten pounds of holy terror in a five pound bag, and given away his sword to boot. Whoever’d decided on a principality to guard Her latest vanity project probably hadn’t even done a feasibility study first. Just ask the angelic cuisinart to keep two squishy mortals safe and sound in an endlessly complex environment with no real benchmarks and only one rule--what could possibly go wrong?

“I understand that, and I try to make allowances for it--I really do--”

“Oh, you make allowances for it, do you?” Crowley hissed, staring at him. The heaven kind of wiles did Aziraphale really think he’d been getting up to, on his knees in the mud all one day and up to his elbows in wet sand the next, Eve hinting at this and Adam wheedling him for that, wanting to spit that it wasn’t his problem and guilt curling up like a vine to strangle it in his throat because no, it wasn’t his problem, but he’d sure as Hell made it theirs.

“-- _but_ ,” Aziraphale plowed on, refusing to be deterred, “I have to ask that you please, for all our sakes, at least confine yourself to the temptations that don’t involve lust?”

Crowley blinked at him, everything he’d been about to say crashing right into a brick wall and then helpfully falling down an adjacent flight of stairs. “Lust.”

“Yes.” Aziraphale folded his hands and bit his lips. “It really… It really doesn’t seem like such an imposition, for you to not do… that one thing.”

Crowley blinked again, slowly, then turned around and exhaled even more slowly. He was going to laugh at Aziraphale again, and the angel was going to fly into such a temper with him. Bananas. He rubbed his forehead. He could picture it, even now. One of them had been eating, and the other one had _noticed_ , and done that wiggle-glance-smile thing they did when they wanted each other to _notice_ them noticing, and it had all escalated from there.

“You know, it doesn’t really seem like such an imposition for you to just give them a few hours to themselves,” Crowley managed after a moment. He’d even said it with a straight face, Satan help him. _Leave them be to scratch what little pleasure they can get out of this whole awful thing, angel._ “Go, I don’t know, track back to the last oasis or two, see how long it’s really taking the plants to bounce back from two humans gnawing on them.”

Eden had never had anything but abundance; so far his poor attempts weren’t faring nearly so well.

“Hh--!” Aziraphale gasped, his mouth falling open. “You… you beast!”

“Guilty as charged,” Crowley said, rolling his eyes. Here they went, because of course they did.

“Very well, then.” Aziraphale squared his shoulders and set his jaw. “I won’t allow it.”

“Oh, you won’t allow it?” Crowley leaned back against a palm and grinned. “An angel won’t _allow_ it?” 

Aziraphale’s eyes brightened at that, his cheeks growing pinker and his irises bluer, and that holy aura was bleeding through around the edges, and Crowley drank in the sight of him.

He shouldn’t bait Aziraphale like this. Even beyond him having no real idea where the brightline was between ‘tolerable nuisance, leave intact’ and ‘infernal threat, terminate with prejudice’ in a principality’s internal calculus, the whole saving-humanity thing depended on the two of them working together in something approaching harmony. Very definitely, the whole being-a-demon thing depended on him not being a fine bloody mist soaking into warm sand, no more blistered hands or little triumphs or tedious maunderings about where his mistakes had led him.

But then, if he’d ever been much of one for resisting his worst impulses, he wouldn’t be in this mess, would he?

“Well, I suppose you’re more than welcome to try and stop me, aren’t you?” Crowley asked, laughing. Aziraphale was certainly more than welcome to try getting between the pair of them, anyway. Crowley wouldn’t have ventured it for all the fertile soil in the crescent--he’d been contenting himself with a swift and quiet exit, stage left, before things got too intimate--but then he hadn’t been created specifically for combat, with the attendant confidence in his ability to withstand a thorough squashing. Probably easier to blast away embarrassing stains with a halo than a curse, too, when separating the pair of them didn’t work.

Aziraphale looked away suddenly, hand going to his eyes, and the glow was snuffed out like a candle. He sniffled, and Crowley did groan at that.

“Ugh. Don’t start with the waterworks, angel,” he said, making a face. Not that they weren’t more than warranted half the time, but he’d sat through enough encore performances by now that he was in no hurry to do it again just because the humans were having orgasms.

“I can’t help it, can I?” he cried, wiping tears from his face with the back of his arm. “She’s so vulnerable, and the baby’s getting so big, and he won’t stop pestering her, and you won’t stop making him, and I can’t do anything about it without--” He broke off, gesturing around them. “Without all three of them suffering.”

“What do you mean, he won’t stop pestering her?” Crowley asked. It had seemed about fifty-fifty, from the incidents he’d been around for. Yesterday it had been the most intent and dedicated peach-eating he could have imagined, very pointedly directed at Adam and with a pay-off that had barely left Crowley time to beat wings out of the general vicinity. From what Eve had told him, now that they could bathe and sleep comfortably most nights, there was practically nothing Adam could throw her way that would be unwelcome.

“It’s like… the bigger this gets,” her hand had rested on the swell of her belly, “the hotter _this_ gets?” Her hand had slipped lower. “Is that supposed to happen?”

He’d floundered his way through an investigation of whether that had been happening prior to the Apple Incident--which, mercifully, it had--and a conclusion that yes, it probably was, but he’d felt the whole time that it was really more Aziraphale’s department than his. Humans had barely been more than a few laughably ambitious schematics and overblown promises when the War had broken out. Crowley was only just assuming Eve’s womb contained _it_ and not _them_ based on the way Aziraphale talked; litters had still very much been on the table the last time he’d seen any memoranda on the subject.

“Well, for one thing, he’s constantly…” Aziraphale blushed ferociously, cheeks practically turning scarlet. He gestured vaguely.

“That narrows it down considerably,” Crowley said, nodding solemnly. “Thank you, angel. I’ll have a talk with him about his constant loose-fingered hand-flapping.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose, and Crowley shook his head.

“If you don’t want to be mocked, then you could at least try not being so mockable,” he grunted. Aziraphale’s mouth fell open.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” he snapped, fussing with his ring. 

Probably reminding himself he could turn me into so much ichor and smoke if he really wanted, Crowley thought bitterly.

“Then what were you going to say?” he asked.

Aziraphale swallowed and folded his hands against his belly, the very picture of unassailable dignity and grace except for the part where the sunset was highlighting the fetching blush on his cheeks and turning his hair a delightful gold and making his robes a bit more translucent than normal. Crowley tore his eyes away and tried not to wonder if that belly was as soft as it looked. 

He’d never have thought it, he told himself, not on his own, not without Eve pressing his ear to her breast so he could hear her heartbeat.

“When I can’t sleep, I do this with Adam, and listen until I can.”

Her body had been so abominably yielding against his cheek, so horribly… fleshy. It had been all he could do not to blurt out that they were supposed to have had exoskeletons, big tough things to protect them from discorporation. All it would take was that one little organ pumping away behind a thin sheet of bone and cartilage calling it quits, and that would be it--humanity puffed out of existence just as it was getting started.

It was different, thinking about Aziraphale’s quartermaster-issued flesh. Neither of them were in a great hurry to get themselves hurt, but it wasn’t like it carried through to _them_. If Aziraphale was really as soft as he looked, well. The principality was more than equipped to defend himself, and if he didn’t, it was just a matter of getting a new body from the storehouse. It looked like that softness might be fun, instead of fucking terrifying.

“I was going to say,” Aziraphale said firmly, and Crowley could hear him steeling himself for it, “that in spite of the fact that she has very clearly successfully conceived already, he keeps applying his… his penis. To her vaginal canal.”

Crowley couldn’t help but turn to stare at him at that, and then he couldn’t help but wonder if principalities could discorporate from embarrassment. _Would’ve been good to know, back during the War._

He’d probably have caught a title, bringing back juicy intel like that.

“And?” Crowley asked, when Aziraphale didn’t continue.

“And, what?” Aziraphale demanded, spreading his hands. “How is that not enough?”

Crowley pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mean, is she not into it? Is it not getting her off? Do they need a subtle hint about scrubbing up afterward? What, exactly, is the problem here?”

Aziraphale stared at him, goggle-eyed, and Crowley tried not to retroactively apply that expression to every single time he’d--through no fault of his own--found the angel’s corporation pleasing. It was only stress and boredom and surprise and the general sense that a demon really _shouldn’t_ and therefore absolutely _must_ goading him on, that was all. But fucking heaven, somewhere in the past month of exposure to those smiles and those eyes and that righteous aura, he’d gotten far enough to need a reminder.

“She’s already conceived,” Aziraphale tried explaining again, as if perhaps Crowley had just missed it the first time around. “She won’t be able to conceive again until after she’s given birth, and--preferably, for health reasons--she won’t actually conceive again until the baby’s ready to wean, in about,” Aziraphale waved his hand the way he did when he was fudging numbers and could mean anything from what he said to ten times as much, “two years.”

Crowley tilted his head. “Okay. And the part where that has anything at all to do with them fucking is…?”

“Crowley!” It was a yelp, like something had come along and stung the angel.

He pictured the likely reaction if Aziraphale sat them down and asked them to please refrain from the constellation of acts most likely to give them a bit of fun without a disproportionate amount of work and shuddered.

“Angel,” he sighed, rubbing his forehead, “what’s it blessed hurting?”

“You mean besides her?” Aziraphale demanded.

“Wait, how’s it hurting her?” Crowley asked, brows furrowing. Oh, heaven, he’d fucked it up, hadn’t he? She’d told him, come to him for advice, and he’d mucked it all up by saying it was fine and she could do as she liked. He should have made Aziraphale handle it; if the angel didn’t know off the top of his head, he could at least pop Upstairs and ask to see the blueprints. “It’s not jiggling the womb around too much, is it? She said they’d had to nix a few positions, but otherwise it seemed…”

Aziraphale stared at him like he’d just announced a plan to poison the next oasis.

“What do you mean, how’s it hurting her?” he asked quietly. “She’s got her baby. She shouldn’t have to keep putting up with an _intrusion_ like that just so he can have a bit of a…” He scoffed. “A climax. A few seconds of climax.”

Crowley took a deep breath and tried not to think of every single choice he could have made differently so as not to end up here, having this conversation.

“Don’t start,” Aziraphale warned.

“With what?” Crowley croaked, trying not to laugh. If he gave in and laughed, he wasn’t going to be able to stop, and Aziraphale might really smite him. “Please, angel, enlighten me about where I’m going to start, because I currently haven’t the faintest blessed clue.”

“With your wiles.” Aziraphale let his wings flare, and of course the moon was rising, low and heavy in the sky and in love with every blessed line of him. Someone has designed those wings to be this transcendent and all the while known they were meant to be drenched with hot ichor as often as not, and Crowley wondered how it wasn’t all some kind of blasphemy too deep and subtle for Hell to ever think of. He wondered if this was what it felt like, to have Her personal and dedicated hatred--to have an angel like Aziraphale stand there in the moonlight and despise him. “With your infernal perversions of the truth.”

Crowley swallowed. Well. If this wasn’t what it felt like, he hoped he never found out what was.

“Angel.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked his fill, because like heaven was he doing this to himself again, but if this was the last time then he was going to make it worth his while. “Angel, you said you’d done a, uh, a whole _seminar_ in this, yeah? Care and keeping of humans?”

“Yes. It was extremely… thorough.” Aziraphale’s grim look made him want to ask if that meant he knew what to do, if those hearts really did stop. If those horrifically breakable bodies got broken.

“Okay, then. Do you remember the bits about sex being fun?” Crowley asked. He imagined that part accidentally getting left out, just two confused humans waving disinterested genitals at each other in the hopes that it took, and well, that was a thought it was going to take some doing to dislodge. 

_I could have just run away, once all the shouting and sword-waving started. Wriggled my way into a blue giant and hoped nobody noticed._

Come to think of it, he could’ve just poisoned the tree. That would’ve done just as well, really. God’s special tree, so wonderful She wouldn’t even share it with Her beloved humans, ruined and rotten in the middle of Her perfect garden. Satan would have loved it, and the humans would have been fine. Aziraphale would have been fine, guarding his little gate with his sword, no hard decisions for him to worry his pretty head about.

Aziraphale scoffed and frowned, eyes going almost violet in the light. That was what had been at his side in the cool desert night, lips whispering his thanks against Crowley’s ear like a ghost.

 _You’re doing this on purpose, I know You are._ The bitter little voice in the back of his mind was just one long howl at it.

“Yes. You have to stimulate the penis for a bit to achieve ejaculation, without which there’s no conception. Ejaculation is generally accompanied by a brief neural and hormonal…” Aziraphale waved his hand vaguely. “... _paroxysm_.”

“Wh--” Crowley puffed out his cheeks. Violet-eyed and glowing with holiness and then throwing a bucket of cold water on the whole thing. It was Her handiwork, all right. “You.” He ran his fingers through his hair and tried to gather his thoughts. “Who the blessed heaven-bound fuck did you have teaching this class?”

“The archangel Gabriel,” Aziraphale told him. It sounded like a dare, like he’d love to see Crowley try undermining that received wisdom, and Crowley wondered if this was what it felt like, to spend a little too long shoulders-deep in a quasar.

“Archangels don’t serve on development teams,” Crowley said flatly. The Third Choir hadn’t involved a single thing that would pass for an engineer, even. “Satan’s sake, they’re--they’re paper-pushers!”

“So Gabriel lied? Really? That’s what you’re going with?” Aziraphale’s lips twisted, as if he was disappointed in Crowley somehow.

“I mean.” Crowley wouldn’t put it past him--he’d never met an archangel that wasn’t a slippery bastard at the best of times--but then, it wasn’t a lie so much as an omission big enough to fit a whole new galaxy in. “I don’t know. Can’t speak to it, sounds like your instruction went into quite a lot, and I’m certainly not an expert. But the whole ‘stimulation, ejaculation, conception’ thing is leaving whole loads of stuff out.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, it’s fun,” Crowley said. Aziraphale laughed, surprise and disbelief combined in something that didn’t sound at all amused, and crossed his arms. “For both of them. Throughout the entire process.”

“Well-versed in it, are you?” Aziraphale asked, shooting him a hurt glance. “I should have known you’d be off… _intercoursing_ around while I was trying to keep them safe.”

“I--sh--” Crowley sucked at his teeth. All right, no-- _this_ was what it felt like to spend too long shoulders-deep in a quasar. “Who, exactly, would I be having intercourse with?”

“Other demons.”

Crowley blinked and rocked back on his heels, images coming to mind unbidden. He had better odds of making it out of something like that without getting stabbed--or bitten, or poisoned, or ripped limb from sodding limb--if he tried his luck with a cherub. “Have you ever met a single other demon?”

Aziraphale huffed and looked at him, eyes tracing the lines of his corporation, and then looked away again, blushing.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been a bit too busy lately trying to keep the humans--your charges, I might add--fed and watered to go intercoursing anyone.” Crowley pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. 

Maybe he currently had his head stuck in a quasar, and he’d just hallucinated the whole fucking thing. She’d notice in a minute or so and fish him out, pat him on the back, and send him staggering off to gate-crash the next nebula down the line. He wasn’t really standing here arguing about sex with a principality who might conceivably find him intercoursable. Or maybe it was just the suggestion of it that had Aziraphale blushing, the filthy idea of a fornicator’s arms around him. Surely that was it? 

He shook himself. “I’m sure I’ll get around to it, once things’ve settled down.”

Aziraphale glanced at him. “So if you’ve never--”

“I didn’t say that,” Crowley snapped.

“Then you have?” Aziraphale asked, pouncing on the opportunity to pin him down with specifics. Crowley made a face. He shouldn’t have spent so much time early on teasing the angel; he’d given away half the store just to keep Aziraphale talking.

“I didn’t say that, either.”

“So you haven’t,” Aziraphale said, smirking. “Well then, how do you know it’s fun the whole time, for both of them?”

“Fucking heaven, angel,” Crowley groaned. “Because I listen!”

“Oh.” Aziraphale fell back a pace, his eyebrows climbing, and Crowley sputtered.

“Not like that, you great shuttlecock!” he said, throwing up his arms. He could’ve been careless around a singularity, had a nice industrial accident, and been squirreled away in the rehab wing this whole time. Probably not even a single principality on the whole floor. Hell, they were so out of the loop in that ward that if he’d done it early enough, he might never have heard the word ‘principality,’ remained blissfully ignorant of the whole Third Choir. “Not on purpose, at least--sound fucking carries out here, sometimes, whether it’s them intercoursing or you singing, and there’s only so loud you can hum, at the end of the day.”

“You don’t like my singing?” Aziraphale asked, pouting.

“Never said that,” Crowley said instantly. He pasted a smile across his face. “It’s very… very powerful. Moving. Very heart-felt.”

He watched as Aziraphale calmed a bit, relaxing as the angel did.

“I listen when Eve talks about it,” he continued, more quietly this time. “I listen when they talk to each other. I listen when they joke with each other, and flirt with each other. They’re both having a good time, angel. Ask her if you don’t believe me. Heaven, ask her even if you do, just to keep yourself from worrying over it. Trust but verify, and all that.”

“And if it’s just been you, encouraging them?” Aziraphale asked.

“I haven’t been. I mean, not like you mean,” Crowley corrected himself hastily. “You know, giving them their privacy, letting them sleep in, that sort of thing. Not demonic wiles.”

“You said--”

“You accused me.”

Aziraphale bit his lip and looked down. “Well, you let me.”

“I’ve never let you do a single blessed thing,” Crowley retorted. “Pfft. Like a wrecking ball saying, ‘Oh, well you let me knock that wall down.’ Could hardly stop you if I tried, once you get yourself fixed on something.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, then shut it again, his eyes going wide in a slow sort of amazement.

“Don’t go getting too full of yourself there, angel,” Crowley said, his skin prickling at that attention focused on him. “Pride, and all that.”

“Of course,” Aziraphale said, clearing his throat. “Pride.” He swallowed. “All right. So I’ll talk to Eve. And what if she says that yes, she’s being… pestered?”

Crowley spread his hands. “Then you deal with it as best you can. They’re your charges, you’ve got the operator’s codes. If anyone can fix whatever’s gone wrong there, it’ll be you.”

Aziraphale nodded and took a deep breath, and Crowley suppressed a smile. Aziraphale wouldn’t take it well, but still--the angel was adorable when he’d settled something for himself. It was like watching a young lion playing with a wildebeest femur, utterly darling until the teeth and claws came into sharp focus.

He extended his hand, and Crowley stared at it.

“It’s agreed,” Aziraphale prompted, arching his eyebrows and glancing at his own outstretched hand. “We should shake on it.”

“Bless it to Heaven, angel. Whatever makes you happy,” Crowley said, clasping his hand. He wasn’t prepared for the cool shiver of… _something_ that ran through him, but the pink of Aziraphale’s cheeks in the moonlight from that range was more than enough to keep him from giving himself away.

 _Enough to stun an ox, this close up._ Crowley made himself let go of the angel’s hand, and Aziraphale tucked it inside his sleeve with a little smile.

“Thank you, Crowley.”

With that, Aziraphale spread those dazzling wings and flew off, doubtless to go have the most awkward conversation of Eve’s life with her as soon as he could get her alone.


	2. Chapter 2

Crowley felt more than heard Aziraphale’s landing, that stiff breeze followed just as quickly by still air and heavier silence. He’d gotten better about dealing with sand, at least--no more kicking or angry tutting or surreptitious little miracles to keep it out of his sandals in the first place. It meant Crowley could pretend he was still asleep, keep his eyes closed for another blessed hour if he wanted, and coincidentally avoid whatever frivolous complaint Aziraphale had come to harass him with this time. Maybe the flowers were too blue instead of not blue enough, or the angel had mistaken another pomegranate for an apple and had an opinion to offer about whether they had to look so alike, or he’d seen a bat and taken it into his head that Crowley had summoned reinforcements.

He’d half a mind to sit the angel down and ask what it was that had him so keyed up; he’d been a proper bundle of virtuous nerves the past few days, all wrung hands and ruffled feathers and hair-trigger flouncing. Of course, the other half of Crowley’s mind was very firmly of the opinion that if he just kept his eyes closed, Aziraphale might go find someone else to listen to his floral fault-finding, and Crowley could get back to his nap.

Crowley felt the odd prickle of angelic focus, his corporation’s skin going goose-fleshed and chill, and it was hard to suppress a shiver at it. Maybe Aziraphale was tense because he’d only needed this one last oasis to sustain the humans until he figured out something better, and now it was finally time to smite the cause of all their problems. Crowley tried not to find it so plausible. It’d probably serve him right, though, letting his guard down like that. 

Oh, but Aziraphale’s so _pretty_ , and so _fluffy_ , and he looks so _warm_ , he sing-songed to himself bitterly. So were fucking polar bears, but he knew better than to get stupid about them. Well, either way, he wasn’t going to give Aziraphale the satisfaction of it. If the principality wanted him dead, the principality wasn’t going to get to toy with him first.

Aziraphale cleared his throat softly. “I say, Crowley? Are you awake?”

Crowley didn’t stir. All right, maybe he was being an idiot, thinking Aziraphale was going to murder him after all, but that still didn’t change the fact that he was in no mood to suffer through another round of comparisons between his work and Hers.

“I make stars, angel. Stars! Not fucking rutabagas. Completely different fucking objects. You can’t expect perfection the first time out of the gate, and I won’t put up with being shouted at over one fiddly fucking mistake!”

Except that he’d been the one shouting, not Aziraphale, and he hadn’t even been in the right ballpark with that fucking passion fruit, and it really hadn’t been fair to yell at the angel over his own mistake, even if he’d only been launching a preemptive strike. He’d have to apologize over that one, once Aziraphale had gotten whatever this was out of his system and wouldn’t just nitpick the apology to pieces. 

Not that Crowley had so much to apologize for, aside from the shouting. There was a reason habitat-building had been the provenance of three-score different teams, and as often as not devolved into absolute chaos when all the specialists secretly thought their bit was best and most important. 

As much as Crowley’d been trying to work on puffing up his pride, it’d be years before he could look at that sort of craftsmanship and expertise and just assume he could wing it because he’d spent a slow afternoon or two going “Here, wot’s this do?” before it had even been ready for roll-out. He’d been driven by boredom this time around, then a sort of vague panic that he’d gotten everyone depending on him and was about to let them down. He wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing.

Aziraphale cleared his throat a little louder, and Crowley could hear the faint rustle of his robes as he drew a few steps closer. “Crowley? Are you awake?”

_No, go away, I’m sorry I yelled at you but if you tell me something grew greener in Eden one more time I will literally tear my hair and gnash my teeth, I fucking swear I will._

And besides, hadn’t he earned a bit of a nap? Except for the one principality-induced hissy fit, he’d been working nonstop since Aziraphale had winged it back to the humans to grill Eve about whether or not sex was a good time. Then again, it might be better if he hadn’t earned it. It would at least be sloth, if he hadn’t earned it. 

_Good old Crowley, goldbricking when all of humanity was at stake--pin a medal on ‘im, lads, that one’s a keeper!_ If he just sold it with enough confidence, he could get Belphegor nodding blearily along to avoid having to think too hard about it, and then everyone else would grumble for normal demonic reasons instead of specific him-related reasons.

Aziraphale exhaled irritably, and that rustle of angelic finery was decidedly less faint, and Satan’s sake, what could the angel possibly want that was so important? Nothing, that was what. If it had been really important, he’d have just shaken Crowley awake straight off, none of his polite hemming and decorous hawing. Aziraphale just wanted someone to bother, and the humans weren’t having it, that was all. Well, he wasn’t having it, either. Not today. He wasn’t batting an eyelash for anything less than an earthquake, and Aziraphale could lump it.

“ _ **Crowley!**_ ”

Crowley bolted upright, eyes flying open and ears ringing with a sound like the tearing of firmament itself, an unspoken _in the name of God I command thee_ reverberating through the air and crashing back in on itself like an endless wave.

“Wh--fucking heav--” He cast about them, every hair on his body standing on end, heart hammering out of his chest. There, standing not two meters away and looking innocent as a lamb, was the principality.

“Oh, good, you’re awake!” Aziraphale said, his shoulders softening with relief. 

“The fuck was that?” Crowley demanded, staring at him. No, there would be absolutely no surviving a flock of Aziraphales.

“What was what?” Aziraphale asked, guileless enough that Crowley actually wanted to believe him. It was outrageous, the angel standing there with that look on his face when he’d just about shouted Crowley out of his skin. 

Outrageous, and Crowley shut his mouth with a snap as soon as he said, “You--!”

He couldn’t call Aziraphale on it without admitting that he’d only been pretending to sleep, could he?

Crowley ran his fingers through his hair and looked around. Not a leaf was out of place, in spite of what had felt like getting caught in the blast of a war trumpet.

“There was… a noise,” Crowley said, getting his heart back under control. “A bloody great big one.”

Aziraphale frowned and looked around, mimicking Crowley’s gesture with a flawless sincerity, then looked up. “I suppose it might have been thunder? There was a bit, right before you woke.”

“Thunder?” Crowley hissed. “There’s not a cloud in the sky, angel.”

“What’s that to do with anything?” he asked, brow furrowing for a moment before he cocked his head and got that blank-faced innocence back up like a forcefield.

“You get thunder from thunderheads,” Crowley grunted, getting to his feet. “Blessed heaven.”

“You get thunder from waves of compressed air expanding,” Aziraphale corrected, clicking his tongue.

“Yeah. From the superheated path of lightning strikes, which on this planet occur principally in association with whopping great rainclouds, also known as thunderheads,” Crowley said, glaring at him.

“Oh.” Aziraphale’s lips twitched. “Erm. Well, first time for everything. Maybe it’s the same as the plants not growing quite right, what with, ah, sin having entered the world and marred creation?”

Crowley rubbed his eyes and, really, tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth was beginning to look like an underreaction. “Did you need something?”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale smiled, and this time there was a glow about it that was nothing but relief.

“You. Standing there, for no apparent reason, in the middle of this broken world’s first storm-free thunderclap. Did you need something?”

“Oh, well.” Aziraphale tugged at the edge of his sleeve. “Not really. You know, nothing important. But I suppose… maybe, that is, since you’re awake…”

“Oh,” Crowley said, chuckling and waving his hand. “Well, if it’s nothing important, I might as well try to get back to my nap. Never know when--”

“Crowley!” 

He honestly sounded hurt, and Crowley might have given in if Aziraphale hadn’t just about given him a heart attack. He walked the few paces to a palm that had refused to grow right, bowing until it was damn near parallel to the ground before shooting skyward, and settled himself on it. Aziraphale joined him without the slightest trace of compunction, ignoring Crowley’s utter lack of invitation to sit close enough that Crowley could feel the heat--the _warmth_ \--of his corporation, feathers almost brushing Crowley’s arm, and Crowley tried to think of everything he could have done to avoid this fate and couldn’t come up with a single, solitary thing.

“I talked to Eve,” Aziraphale said quietly, after a moment.

 _Oh._ Crowley glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “And?”

“And she laughed at me.”

Crowley could all but hear it, those high, ringing peals. She’d have been surprised by his question, probably gobsmacked on top of that by how Aziraphale would have asked it, then gone a little embarrassed by what he was asking and wanted to cover it up by turning it back on the angel.

“I imagine you probably had it coming, a bit,” Crowley pointed out.

Aziraphale turned pink and pursed his lips. “Perhaps a bit.”

“What did she say, when she got done laughing?”

“She said she wasn’t bothered, and that it was sweet of me to ask.”

“Well, okay then. Mystery solved, mission accomplished, case closed,” Crowley said. “Well done, angel.”

Aziraphale’s hands went tight on the rough trunk beneath them, and he lowered his head and worried at the edge of his lip. “It’s just…”

Crowley groaned. “Come on, angel, don’t do this--”

“I don’t see how it doesn’t!” Aziraphale cut him off in a rush. “Penises are so…” Aziraphale gestured vaguely, hands a good half-meter apart, and Crowley’s eyebrows crept toward the heavens.

“Barnacles, angel,” Crowley managed, after a moment. “You’re thinking of barnacles.”

“What?” Aziraphale sputtered, giving him that look he reserved for when Crowley had derailed his entire train of thought.

“Humans.” Crowley held out his hands. “Barnacles.” He stretched his reach to where Aziraphale’s hands had been. “I mean, if a barnacle was the size of a human. In comparison.” He stopped and scrunched up his nose. “They’re not, right? Barnacles, I mean. Human-sized. They left them bitty little things the size of a grape, didn’t they? Fucking unnerving, if they decided to make them the size of a person.”

Aziraphale blinked at him, halo burning but angel very firmly out to lunch.

“I think you’re just going to have to trust the human to know if she’s up for it,” Crowley said after the moment stretched out beyond all reason, and it became clear that Aziraphale couldn’t formulate a response to his point.

Aziraphale frowned, that unhappy little moue that made Crowley want to stroke his hair and tell him it’d all be fine. Heaven of an offensive weapon, if Crowley was being honest. It was probably the work of whichever bastard it was who’d come up with the idea of making kittens so blessed cute and then giving them needle-sharp claws and no idea how hard to apply them. 

He’d sat in on enough of those meetings in his time--it was blessed easy to imagine a team gone a little too pleased with themselves at the idea of an animate ball of pure and just destruction that somebody’d just give up and hold still for because it looked so sad that they’d felt sorry for it. Funny how most of the ones grinning hardest at that sort of thing had gotten to stay on Upstairs.

“I just don’t see how it could possibly be pleasant,” Aziraphale said quietly. “And then she laughed at me some more, and told me _you_ could explain it, and--”

“She wot.”

“Well, obviously not the technical aspects,” Aziraphale said, looking away.

“Yeah, obviously.” Crowley swallowed. He could picture it now, those brown eyes sparkling at the thought of a red-faced angel stammering about stimulating penises and vaginal canals at Crowley for days on end. Just because he’d accidentally got her kicked out of paradise, it was no reason to drag him down with her. “’s your department, the ejaculate and oviposition and so forth.”

“Ovulation,” Aziraphale said, wincing.

“’s wot I said.” Crowley shivered, feeling about ready to twitch out of his skin. “Anyway, you don’t need me to explain it. You’ve got access to the original plans, don’t you? Just--” He jerked his thumb up and clicked his tongue. “--leg it back Upstairs and check the documentation.”

Aziraphale’s eyes went round as saucers. “You cannot seriously be suggesting that I go and… and _inspect_ the--” He broke off, shaking his head. “I can’t put in a _request_ about this! It’d start an inquiry. And then I’d have to tell them why I was asking, and if the archangels find out they’re...” He paused. “Does it count as copulating if it’s not for procreation?”

“The heaven should I know?” Crowley kneaded his temples.

“If the archangels find out that they’re...”

“Fucking.”

Aziraphale glared at him. “That they’re intercoursing, they’ll object.”

“Well, the archangels certainly don’t have to intercourse anybody if they don’t want to,” Crowley said sourly. “Can’t see anybody lining up for _that_ divine privilege.”

Aziraphale stiffened at that, breath catching in his throat, and Crowley rubbed his eyes.

“Or,” he said, because it wasn’t too late for an angel to see reason, “you could just listen to the woman when she says it’s fun, and move on to the next thing on your list to fret yourself sick over.”

Aziraphale grimaced. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to explain it.” He shook his head. “Even you can’t put a pretty face on something like that just being shoved--”

He broke off and looked away, and Crowley cocked his head.

_Bait, you idiot, it’s bait, he’s dangling it in front of you like a worm on a hook because you can never shut your blessed fucking mouth--_

“Well, no, I suppose it wouldn’t be much fun, people going and just _shoving_ things places,” Crowley sighed, sliding off the palm’s trunk. “Good thing that’s not how it goes.”

He braced his hands on the back of his hips, pushed them forward, and cracked his back. It was as satisfying as it could be, with his wings sitting in the ether like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Maybe one day he’d get the hang of napping in human form with them out. Maybe one day Aziraphale would look on them and not remember precisely what he was at double-time. It was almost like he could slither in under the radar, with his blackened wings hidden from casual view.

“No rest for the wicked, eh?” Crowley could feel Aziraphale’s eyes boring into the back of his head. How wonderful to have such a bulletproof reason for getting the fuck out of the conversation before it really got itself into the weeds. “You were right, by the way, about that vine. I should’ve noticed it wasn’t the one you can eat. I’m sorry I shouted at you about it.”

“Crowley.”

Crowley tried to steel himself against it, that sad little voice that sounded like a lost cub crying for its mother.

_You just fucking watched him pretend not to have shouted you halfway back to Hell and then actually did get talked into letting him get away with it. How can you not see through this?_

Crowley turned around with a grunt. How hopeless did he have to get, when even that little voice in the back of his head was abandoning him in revolt at his stupidity?

“Angel,” he said firmly. “You don’t have to understand everything. Some things you can just take on faith, with a side of testimony, and, y’know, secondhand evidence.”

“I know I don’t have to understand everything,” Aziraphale said, squaring his shoulders even as he didn’t look up from his knees. “But I think I _should_ understand _this_. I’m responsible for their welfare, after all, and… and it’s my fault they’re in this mess.”

“Think there’s plenty of blame to go around, there,” Crowley said. He chewed the inside of his cheek, then brightened. Two could play at this game just as easily as one. He stretched his neck, then rolled his shoulders and yawned, the very picture of disinterest. “But I suppose, if you’re really that set on understanding, I could show you.”

“Um.” Aziraphale’s head snapped up, eyes wide and mouth falling open. “That is, I’d really prefer if you just explained it.”

“You’re not going to have any better luck understanding it from me explaining it than you’ve had with me telling you, and Eve telling you,” Crowley said, shaking his head with the best-feigned regret he could manage. “You’ll just argue and dig in your heels and get all tetchy with me and say you don’t see how, the same as you’ve been doing. No, it’s showing or nothing, at this point.”

Aziraphale’s pretty round face went a full shade paler, and Crowley told himself it didn’t sting. It had been disgust, then, the first night this had come up. That dismissive angelic assumption that of course a demon with a corporation was going to be out being as corporeal as possible with it. Hadn’t been entirely wrong, either, had it? Not with the way Crowley’d been taking himself in hand at the memory of that hovering warmth and lovely gratitude. Crowley kept it off his face with the force of sheer will. He’d only been caught off-guard with that ridiculous hope, that was all. He should know better by now.

Crowley rubbed his chin, pretending not to notice Aziraphale’s breath going shallow and too controlled. He was going to turn around in a second and find the spot where Aziraphale had been occupied by nothing but a vortex of dust and shed feathers, the angel breaking the sound barrier in his haste to find something better to do with himself than wring his hands over what the humans got up to of an evening. “Of course, that raises the immediate question of what I get out of it, taking time away from my planting to give you this sort of hands-on demonstration.”

“What happened to it being fun?” Aziraphale asked, his voice hitching.

“Having it, angel,” Crowley chuckled, gentle as could be. “ _Having_ it is fun. But we wouldn’t be having it, would we? I’d just be sort of, walking you through it a little. Fun for you, if I do it right, but fun for me?” Crowley puffed out his cheeks. “Blessed lot of work, more like. No, if I go through all this extra effort just so you can rest easy and save yourself a trip Upstairs, I think I’m going to want something out of it.”

Aziraphale looked like he’d just found himself in some sort of horrible trap, and Crowley tilted his head, the picture of contemplation. It was, he thought, a bit too late to start taking it personally now.

“A kiss,” he said finally, nodding to himself. “If I do this for you, I want a kiss.”

Aziraphale gaped at him, mouth opening and closing like a tadpole that wasn’t quite sure about the whole lung business yet. “I don’t--I’m not--”

Crowley raised his eyebrows slightly and waited patiently for the angel to decide this entire thing had been a ridiculous line of inquiry.

“I don’t want to kiss you!” he burst out, all the color coming back into his cheeks at once.

“Of course you don’t,” Crowley said, smiling slightly. “If you wanted to kiss me, I’d just ask you to and there we go, scratch it off the list.”

“Oh, really, that’s just too much!”

“But I want to try it out,” Crowley continued, ignoring him, “and you want to stop fussing over this, so we’ll trade things we want, yeah?”

“Just go… go kiss someone else, if you want a kiss,” Aziraphale said, crossing his arms sullenly.

“Like who?” Crowley laughed, and it was genuine for once. Eve had made it sound pleasant enough that he’d spent a solid few hours trying to figure out a way he could try it. “The humans? Out of the question. Another demon? Politically inadvisable. Another angel? Universally inadvisable. Nope--you’re it, I’m afraid. Sole available candidate.”

“I supposed that’s too bad for you, then, because I’m not going to let you… bite me,” Aziraphale muttered.

“You don’t bite someone when you kiss them,” Crowley told him, trying not to let the full extent of his bewilderment show on his face. “Satan’s sake, what have those archangels been telling you about all this?”

“Well, I trust them a lot more than I trust you,” Aziraphale said, looking away. “So probably the truth.”

“In that case, I guess there’s really nothing else for it. You’re going to have to ask them, if it’s bothering you so much. Or, I guess, just… let it go,” Crowley reminded him, spreading his hands and wandering a few more steps toward the spring. “Up to you, really.”

Aziraphale blinked at that, his lovely brow drawing into a surprised furrow. “I suppose it is, isn’t it?”

“What was that?” Crowley asked, turning back. He could sense a shift in the air, the sort of thing he’d found more expediently dealt with by slithering off to find an inconspicuous burrow than by sticking his nose in. 

He edged a tick closer to the spring, on high alert as Aziraphale’s lips moved silently. The principality was at his least predictable when things like that were going on. Crowley took another half-step, subtle as he could manage. Wasn’t like he’d been lying about the amount of work he had to do, either--every single blessed one of those stupid vines was going to have to be redone, replaced with the fruit-bearing model.

“It’s up to me,” Aziraphale repeated quietly. He took a deep breath and stuck out his chin. “Fine. I accept your terms.”

“You wot.”

“You’ll show me…” Aziraphale pressed his lips together. “...how it goes, and I’ll give you a kiss.” He shot Crowley a narrow look. “Just the one.”

It was Crowley’s turn to forget how lungs worked for a few moments. “Yeah,” he managed, eventually. “Yeah, just the one. ’s, uh, ’s what I said. Right as… right as a very right thing.”

Aziraphale took another deep breath and swallowed, visibly bracing himself. “So. What comes first?”

_Thinking it through before opening my fat gob, preferably._

“Uh.” Crowley scrambled through everything Eve had ever said, everything that had provoked one of those happy little giggles when the pair had been together and not caring who was trying to get some fucking work done on the next dune over, every way they’d reached for each other and gotten one of those goopy smiles in return. He’d just go ahead and do all that, only it’d be with Aziraphale. “Ah.”

_Not fucking myself over, just once in my blessed life._

He puffed out his cheeks and licked his lips. Not too late to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, was it?

“Well, I think the absolute bog standard first step would be to, y’know, kit yourself out with a cunt.”

“Don’t call it that!” Aziraphale cried, flushing hot.

Crowley reared back and looked to the side, as shocked as if Aziraphale had shouted again. “Well, however you… as you like, angel.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Wasn’t trying to be rude.”

Aziraphale calmed down after a moment and touched his belly. “You mean… everything?”

“Wh--” Crowley almost bit his tongue, it was such a close thing to asking ‘What do you mean, everything?’ “I mean, just the bits that get used in the initial, ah, process. Should be fine. I think.” He tried to get a grip on himself. Not too late to go diving for the spring after all, except that the principality was blessed fucking fast and besides, it wasn’t like a few meters of water would save him from that world-wrecking clarion cry. “Can always change it up if you want more later on.”

“And you’ll… fashion yourself an…” Aziraphale looked away and pressed his lips together, an annoyed little puff escaping through his nose regardless. “An answering portion?”

“Erm.” Crowley sucked at his teeth. “I mean, I’ve already got one, but ’s not really going to come into play? You know, what with us not actually going through with the whole thing.”

“What do you mean, you’ve already got one?” Aziraphale demanded, head swiveling around to pin him with a too-sharp gaze. “What for, if you’re not using it?”

Crowley shrugged, squirming discomfort oozing its way down his spine at the memory of Adam’s slightly-hysterical ‘Can that happen to mine?’ and Eve’s answering horror. “Weirded the humans out that I didn’t.”

“What?” Aziraphale’s voice climbed half an octave, and Crowley could feel that threatening vibration in the air, a thunderclap ready to manifest. “How did they even know?”

“Well, sometimes the wind gets in on the act a bit, and robes are hardly as modest as they’re cracked up to be?” Crowley offered, grimacing. “And, you know, it’s nice to take the occasional break and have a dust-bath, and they’re so blessed quiet sometimes, like little mice--”

“The humans have seen you naked?” Aziraphale squeezed his eyes shut.

“I mean, yeah, but it’s not like it really mattered much, on account of the whole not having…” Crowley’s voice petered out as he realized his explanation was very much not calming Aziraphale down. “Anyway, they got properly spooked, I don’t mind keeping it, shortest distance between two points, et cetera.”

“It’s very strange, don’t you think, that they’ve never expressed similar discomfort about my lack of genitalia?” Aziraphale asked frostily.

“Do I find it strange that they, abandoned by their creator and cast out into a literal wilderness, haven’t taken it upon themselves to criticize what their sole source of protection and comfort has in his trousers.” Crowley tucked his chin against his chest and scrubbed at his scalp. “Yeah, no, sorry. Can’t find a single bit of a surprise there.”

“I’m not--!” Aziraphale glared at him, then looked away. “I’m just doing my job. There’s nothing stopping them.”

“You know, if you’d rather not give yourself a quim, we can just call the whole thing off,” Crowley said. “There’s no need to make a production out of it and go starting arguments with the humans about whether they’ve been going easy on you just because of the, y’know, complete dependence on your goodwill thing.”

“I would never!”

Crowley tilted his head. “Which bit? Calling it off? Bit more enthusiasm than you were showing a minute ago, at least.”

“Start an argument with the humans,” Aziraphale said firmly. His eyes widened. “Are you stalling?”

“Me? Me, stalling?” Crowley sputtered. Of course he wasn’t stalling. Would’ve been a blessed good idea, though. “I told you I already had a prick, and you threw a fit. Have you even conjured up a _vaginal canal_ yet?”

“Don’t say it like that.” Aziraphale drew himself up and set his lips. “And I’m working on it.”

Crowley glared at him. _Just admit you’re in over your head, angel. It’s fine. We’ll pretend it never happened, everything’ll be right as rain._

“Could you please stop looking at me like that?” Aziraphale snapped. “It’s making it very hard to concentrate.”

Crowley turned around and glared at the spring instead. That’s what had started the whole mess--he’d just had to go making a pond in the middle of the desert. He’d wanted a little bath, and then he’d wanted some plants to slither around under, and then he’d wanted a tree to climb, and then everything had been so lovely that before he’d quite realized what he was up to, he’d wanted company. Him and his clumsy wanting, the story of his foolhardy life.

“Could you please stop fuming?” Aziraphale asked, exasperated. “That’s making it just as hard to concentrate.”

“If you can’t swing it now, we can just try again later,” Crowley suggested acidly.

“Very funny,” Aziraphale said, in a tone that suggested he fully intended to be peevish over it for the next decade. A sudden flicker of warm light reflected off the water, and Crowley could have basked in it even as Aziraphale gasped, delighted. “Oh! I got it!”

Crowley rubbed his eyes and tried to swallow the strangled, screaming laugh that wanted to claw its way out of his chest. He was going to burn himself to a crisp on that holy brilliance and not even regret it, and if he ever tracked down the team responsible for principalities, he might actually manage to stick a blade in someone and not feel completely wretched over it.

“Congratulations,” Crowley whispered, instead. “Can I look at you again?”

“Yes.” Aziraphale sounded pleased as punch with himself, the bastard, and Crowley turned around. There was nothing different about him, except for that smug glow and that smug smile, and Crowley wanted to skip straight to the bit where he claimed his reward.

“All right. So, you’ve got your quim, and I’ve been ready,” Crowley said, drawing a desperate and whistling blank. “Onto the next step, then.”

“Which is…?” Aziraphale prompted.

Crowley bit back an exasperated scoff. Who the blessed fuck knew, with an angel? If it was the humans, they’d have already been sitting right next to each other, or one playing with the other’s hair, or leaning on each other, idle hand running up a thigh…

Crowley swallowed. Well, no reason not to go for broke, was there? It could hardly be any more of a disaster than it was already going to be. And if he could touch, just a little, if he could make Aziraphale feel a bit of pleasure at it...

“The warm-up,” Crowley said firmly, running his eyes over Aziraphale’s corporation. Aziraphale blanched at that, and Crowley did a hasty re-assessment of how the angel was likely to let him touch. Nothing on his back, that was for blessed sure. Not his face, either. Probably best to keep away from the whole cranial region, really.

Crowley ventured closer, trying to project confidence the way he had right after the Fall, when any sign of weakness saw everyone going in for the kill. Turned out there was hardly anything he couldn’t survive, if he bluffed hard enough and fast enough and didn’t stop to think about it too long. It didn’t matter how big a mass of quivering jelly a demon was on the inside, provided nobody else caught on. 

Aziraphale quailed, wings closing tight against his spine, and there they went. It was perfect. One brush against that flawless vessel, and Aziraphale would call it off after all. Such a cunning plan he’d come up with--a true demonic mastermind, watching all the pieces fall into place. Aziraphale would call it off, and he wouldn’t have to run his hands over those luminous limbs, and...

Crowley paused, right in front of him, and smirked as hard as he could. Aziraphale flushed and dug his fingers into the palm’s trunk hard enough to dent it, looking away when Crowley didn’t move.

Crowley knelt, fingers ready to curl around the hem of the angel’s robe, and Aziraphale stared at him blankly.

“What are you doing on the ground?” he asked, all trace of nerves gone. Crowley pursed his lips, thrown off-balance by the sudden shift. “You can’t do anything from all the way down there. Not unless it’s,” Aziraphale waved his hands, “barnacle-sized.”

“For the love of--” Crowley closed his eyes, fighting down a groan. “Will you just let me get on with it?”

“I’m only saying, the diagrams were very thorough, and you’re in the wrong--” Aziraphale broke off with a little cry as Crowley’s fingers wrapped around his bare ankle.

“Am I, now?” Crowley purred, rubbing the pad of his thumb in a small, feather-light circle over the bone. He’d never been without calluses, never known a time without scorchmarks or blisters, iron and carbon ground under his nails and into his skin. He’d gotten used to it, wouldn’t have known himself without it until suddenly he wouldn’t have known himself at all, trading it all in for scales and the Pit. How strange then, that a being made for so much harder use would have such a delicate skin, fine and fragile-feeling as the newest fiddlehead on the smallest fern dipping low over the pool beside them.

Crowley lifted the hem of that stainless robe, raising the veil from those sturdy legs. Soft skin and a fine layer of silver hair and beneath it all a plumpness that made Crowley want to taste him. He looked like a confection, and Crowley ached to run his tongue over him. Aziraphale was panting, cheeks flushed and eyes bright, when Crowley pushed the cloth from that sacred knee. His hand was still resting on the ankle of Aziraphale’s other leg, and it was so easy to lean forward, bracket his chest with Aziraphale’s flesh.

 _Demonic mastermind, it’s all a ruse, just to get him to let it alone._ It sounded like the sort of lie only a gormless wanker would believe, even to himself. Aziraphale’s legs were beautiful, and warm, and kneeling there in front of him was comfortable in a way Crowley had never expected.

“That’s not my--” Aziraphale began, only to lose himself when Crowley’s mouth met the inside of his knee, lips finding the tender dimple there and parting ever so slightly. Crowley could taste him, then, taste the faint aridity of the desert air and the traces of salt from that restrained angelic perspiration, and, under it all like a promise, that flare of divinity. He lapped at it, vaguely aware of the way Aziraphale’s panting had turned into breathy little moans, an entirely new entry in the dictionary of principality noises.

Crowley pushed the hem back a tick farther, leaned in closer, and moved from the dimple of Aziraphale’s knee to the round swell of his thigh. The angel’s blood was closer to the surface there, skin hotter and sweeter and softer, and Crowley couldn’t help but suck gently, resting his hand on the outer curve of that pillar of a thigh.

“That’s not my quim, Crowley,” Aziraphale breathed, a tremor running through his corporation. “You’re nowhere even close.”

“Mmm.” Crowley slid his robe up another handsbreadth, moved up to the next patch of perfect skin, and ran his tongue over it. “Getting closer?”

“You’re--you’re toying with me!” Aziraphale gasped, twisting his torso and looking away, cheeks red and a faint sheen of sweat on his glowing face.

“I would never.” Crowley nudged the robe up farther and followed it with his tongue, and oh, but he could do this forever.

“Shall I tell you how wonderful the taste of your skin is?” he murmured, brushing his lips over the blue road of a vein. It was a delightful contrast to the general pale pink of him, giving him the look of marble as well as the endurance of it. Aziraphale’s thighs fell open another few degrees, the work of loosened hips and an arched back, and Crowley felt utterly intoxicated with it. He’d brought this flush to Aziraphale’s cheeks, this lushness to his frame. “That overbearing goodness of yours is right there are the surface, sweetening your very pores.”

Another mouthful of that tender skin, and Crowley let himself glance into the shadow of the angel’s robe, let himself breathe in the smell of the quim Aziraphale had fashioned for this. It was just as pretty as the rest of him, waiting there in the shadow of cloth and belly, and Crowley’s mouth watered. He sucked harder at the flesh under his lips, let his teeth scrape over that blooming heat, and Aziraphale threw his head back and moaned. The glory of it made Crowley’s cock throb, the whole of it stiffening between his own thighs, and Satan, no wonder the humans were always _noticing_ each other if this was what it was like for them.

“Oh, angel,” he breathed, hand sliding under fabric, over hip, around to that wonderfully plush buttock. He had ever felt something so deliriously soft? Fire and emptiness and the cold of the cosmos, and he had loved it while he’d had it, but if he’d known he could have this instead…

“Crowley,” Aziraphale whimpered.

“Mmm?” Crowley ran his other hand over that soft hair on Aziraphale’s shin, up to his knee.

“ _Crowley!_ ”

He smelled it, then, under everything else--the ozone crackle of Aziraphale’s fear. Well, that wouldn’t do at all. He leaned back, letting go and pressing his lips to the round of Aziraphale’s other knee.

“Oh!” Aziraphale’s voice was small, punctuated sharply with disappointment.

Disappointment, and Crowley could laugh with it. He’d been there, hadn’t he? Wanting something and being afraid of it in equal measure right up until it was snatched out of reach, fear evaporating like a mirage as the loss set in.

“What? Have I missed it, then?” Crowley asked gently, hand curling back around Aziraphale’s ankle. “You sure you put it in the right spot?”

Aziraphale huffed at that, flesh quaking against Crowley’s mouth, and Crowley wondered if it would be different noises for a different leg.

He mouthed his way up Aziraphale’s thigh, smiling at the little gasps. The same noises, but at a higher pitch. So much beauty penned up in Eden’s walls, and he’d made off with the best of it. They could pry the angel out of his cold, stiff, taloned fingers, and Crowley suddenly understood the appeal of greed.

Aziraphale’s muscles tensed, legs quivering like a struck drum and wings pressing tight against his shoulders. “Crowley…”

The ozone scent filled Crowley’s nose, back in full force, and he wanted to throw his head back and groan. Of course he didn’t really want a demon. Of course he didn’t really want _this_. Crowley rubbed a soothing circle over the angel’s skin and tried to think, with all the blood that should have been going to his brain currently busy with his cock. 

Aziraphale could as easily blast him to atoms as keep sitting there letting him, and somehow the one thing the angel couldn’t seem to do was back down. Well, that fit, didn’t it? Or maybe it was just a matter of needing to be a bit more comfortable, first, before he could get around to properly wanting it.

Crowley rose slightly on his knees, kissed his way to the top of Aziraphale’s thigh, and brushed the robe up to reveal the crease of his hip, and no--the ozone was all he could smell now. Crowley swallowed, his mouth watering for an entirely different reason, and kept moving up, away from that soft-thatched delta. He’d been right the first time--the angel wouldn’t.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale sighed, all the nervous energy flooding out of him as Crowley’s mouth found the blessed softness of his belly. “You’ve overshot by a mile. Honestly, it’s like you don’t even know what you’re doing.” Crowley ran his tongue over that silken skin and closed his eyes, and Aziraphale scoffed. “Really, you look ridiculous--”

The rest of it was lost in a sound extraordinarily like a tea kettle at a high boil when Crowley pressed his lips to the now-damp skin and blew a firm, determined raspberry.

Aziraphale shoved him hard enough to send him sprawling back on the sand, full length and laughing and grateful that his cock had finally bowed out of proceedings once it became clear Aziraphale wasn’t in any mood to let him continue.

“Oooh, you… you…!” Aziraphale broke off and crossed his arms, cheeks crimson and eyes bright. He dropped them just as quickly, hands clenching into fists against the palm. “I knew I should never have trusted you!”

“Oh, boo,” Crowley said, sticking out his tongue. “You didn’t trust me.”

Aziraphale stared at him, mouth open and mortally offended. “I agreed! I let you…” He glanced down pointedly, then looked away.

“Oh, yeah. You _let_ me, all right,” Crowley snorted. “Like I’m going to keep after you when you’re half out of your wits but too stubborn to say stop.”

“Half out of my--!” Aziraphale straightened up, aghast at the very suggestion, and Crowley couldn’t help but laugh again.

“Every time I got within a mile actually doing anything, you start quivering like a little bunny spotting a hawk’s shadow.” He mimicked the rabbit he’d accidentally startled out of cover a week ago, when it had realized it was him but hadn’t yet been sure what it being him had meant in terms of its short-term survival prospects. “So, you know--at least half. Maybe two thirds.”

“Quivering like a--! How dare you?” Aziraphale asked, eyes blazing. “I am not _afraid_ of the likes of you.”

Crowley propped himself up on his elbows, smirked, and shot a pointed look at his hips, his mercifully quiescent cock suggested in the slight tent of his robes where they pooled between one knee bent and one leg straight. “Afraid of at least some of me.”

The noise Aziraphale made at that was somewhere between a growl and a huff, petulant and frustrated and ready to do something about it, and he moved too fast to see when he lunged at Crowley. Too fast to see, but not quite too fast for Crowley to sense trouble coming and try getting out of its path, feeling rather than seeing those alabaster wings folding back out of the way and those talon-hands stretching out to seize him. When they came to rest, Aziraphale had Crowley stretched beneath him, ribs pinned between his knees and wrists pinned to the ground. 

Aziraphale’s grip was firm but not unpleasant, for all that it meant he was stuck right where he was. Probably the softness of the angel’s hands and the round sweetness of the angel’s thighs, Crowley thought. Still, he had appearances to keep up.

He squirmed for the look of the thing before a warning squeeze, mantled wings, and a stern glare made him subside, and Crowley realized with a slow, paralyzing combination of delight and horror that there was nothing quite as sure as having that magnificent backside pressed hard against his belly and across his hips to bring his cock back to attention. 

He glanced up at the white-clad agent of divine justice looming over him, and oh, heaven, but the sun was even lighting up Aziraphale’s curls in an ersatz halo. Beautiful bastard--Crowley would think he was doing it on purpose if it weren’t for that unalloyed delight in having gotten a quim right and the trembling fear whenever Crowley’d threatened to touch it.

“Erm.” Crowley wriggled again, then stopped when that only made it so much worse, cock decidedly thickening. 

The stupid thing seemed almost to have a mind of its own, except that it wasn’t possessed of even the barest shred of foresight, intelligence, or self-preservation. Crowley wanted to laugh with it--apple didn’t fall far from the tree on that one, apparently. He could have walked away, taken a firm line against angelic importuning, but no. And now here he was, finding out just how velvet the glove around that iron fist was. He shimmied instead, trying to keep his hips well out of it, and Aziraphale only settled on him more firmly. 

Crowley gritted his teeth. “Angel.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Aziraphale said, significantly more sure of himself this time.

Crowley closed his eyes and tried to refrain from blessing everything in sight. Aziraphale had got himself back in hand, and that was wonderful, wasn’t it, but Crowley was pretty blessed sure that if he wound up with his cock hard and seeking a tender berth, they’d be right back where they started.

“Yep. Absolutely. Grand,” he said. If he just focused, he could will the whole package away before it caused any trouble, but focusing was easier said than done with that bright flicker of divine flame practically engulfing him. Possibly he should have been a bit more charitable when Aziraphale had been trying to miracle one into being. “Proved your point, sorry I doubted you, mind getting the heaven off me?”

Aziraphale blinked as if suddenly remembering himself. His eyes went to his hands on Crowley’s wrists, then to the demon trapped between his thighs. He furled his wings slightly, and Crowley could all but hear the precious little _“Oh, I say!”_ that wanted to fly from that pretty throat. Aziraphale’s flush began a slow downward migration, and how did that only make him that much more breathtaking?

“C’mon, angel,” Crowley groaned. “Mercy.”

Aziraphale’s gaze flicked over Crowley’s hair and down to the neck of his robes. Probably looked a right mess, between getting shoved halfway across the oasis and scrambling for cover. Well, they couldn’t both be visions of ethereal beauty. Not like Crowley had been winning any prizes even before the skydive to end all skydives--not like he’d needed to, out in the boundless darkling void all by himself.

“I want an apology.”

“I’m sorry,” Crowley said immediately, twisting his forearms and squirming slightly.

“Tst--!” Aziraphale’s hold on him tightened reflexively, and the angel grimaced and looked away, flush darkening. “A real one!”

Crowley grimaced, mouth going sour. Well, at least that familiar old demand for obeisance would put a damper on his libido. “O, Aziraphale, Guardian of the Eastern Gate of Eden, please forgive this humble creature barely worthy of your notice and certainly not worthy of--”

“That’s not…” Aziraphale sat back, scowling. “I _know_ you know what a real apology is.”

“Look, angel, if you want proper grovelling, you’re going to have to refrain from interrupting every blessed sentence.”

Aziraphale’s rosebud mouth puckered. “Why would I…? I don’t want you…” He clicked his tongue, a flicker of frustration crossing his face. “I don’t want you debasing yourself, you wretched beast! I just want you to apologize. It’s not the same thing!”

“I did apologize,” Crowley pointed out.

“No, you said ‘I’m sorry’ without even thinking about it, or meaning it, in a baldfaced attempt to slither out of consequences,” Aziraphale said.

“Why would I have to think about it?” Crowley asked, brows furrowing. “I’ve upset you enough to do _this_ , and I didn’t mean to make you angry at all, ergo--I’m sorry.”

“You did all that just to mock me and make a fool of me, and you didn’t mean to make me angry?” Aziraphale asked, his eyes turning that bright blue that Crowley had always wished they’d gone with for the sky.

“I did this because you wouldn’t stop torturing yourself over it, and I thought it would help, and you’re too blessed beautiful for me not to be game for it, and then you didn’t want it after all and wouldn’t throw in the towel, so yes, I pulled the emergency brake for you.” Crowley shut his mouth, too late not to say too much. Half of it would have done, and Aziraphale’s eyes were already narrowing, lips parting to ask a follow-up question or five, and Crowley suddenly very much felt the angel’s weight on him. “So believe me when I say that yes, I’m heartily sorry for any and all of it.”

“You…” Aziraphale tilted his head, those fascinating eyes searching his face intently and the rest of the angel gone oddly immobile. 

Crowley felt like an insect in a curio cabinet, run through and spread open and on display, every last layer of him laid bare for the idle interest of any passing observer. He hissed and writhed again, the first time he’d been able to put any sort of real and decided intent behind it, for all the good it would do him against Heaven’s immovable bulwark--Aziraphale had been created to stand eternal and firm against a horde of demons, never mind him. 

And yet the angel couldn’t look at him like that and expect him to simply bear it, could he? Crowley wasn’t so abject that he couldn’t at the very least object, even if he knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. Aziraphale made a little noise--regret all wound up with alarm and sadness, first heard when the angel had trod on an unwary butterfly and gone wobble-lipped and drippy until Crowley miracled it back--and then dipped forward, fast and smooth as a hummingbird after a flower.

His lips met Crowley’s in a rough and awkward mishmash that still carried the sort of charge he’d once associated with solar flares and galactic currents, and the fluid grace of the movement belied the momentum of it as Aziraphale’s weight shifted half onto hands still pressing Crowley’s wrists to the ground and half onto Crowley’s face.

“Mmph?”

A simple question only a stunned idiot would ask, and Crowley regretted trying the moment his teeth parted. If the angel’s lips against his were a solar flare, the angel’s mouth on his was like punching through the photosphere. He arched helplessly against Aziraphale, fingers digging into his palms with the frustrated need to touch, to stroke those blond curls, to dig into those glossy coverts. He was melting with it, undone with it, and still, that weight held him in place.

Aziraphale lifted his head after what felt like an eternity, cheeks pink and lips plump and dark as if he’d been eating a pomegranate, and his eyes were like the ocean at night.

“Blessed heaven, angel,” Crowley breathed.

Aziraphale hummed softly. “You know,” he said, all tranquil contemplation, “I feel as if I didn’t get that quite right.”

He had, in fact, made a pig’s ear of it, if Eve’s description was anything to go by, but Crowley wasn’t sure Aziraphale getting it right would be a survivable experience. What a way to go, though--the sort of reward that made horrific risk of a personal and physical nature suddenly worth it instead of a decisive argument for going without.

“A bargain’s a bargain,” Aziraphale said, his eyes focused on Crowley’s lips. “I really should make certain.”

This time when their lips met, Crowley tilted his head so their faces fit together properly, and Aziraphale let go of his wrists to dig his fingers into Crowley’s hair. Crowley was free to slide one hand up to card through those incandescent curls and one hand up that adamant spine, crooked fingers scratching gently down the length of it until his hand rested in the small of Aziraphale’s back. Aziraphale arched under it, a small moan of pleasure voiced right against Crowley’s mouth, and Crowley couldn’t help but suck at his lower lip with all the same gentle hunger he’d brought to the angel’s thighs. Aziraphale’s jaw softened, and Crowley pressed up against him, hungry and needy and not caring if Aziraphale saw him like this, not when Aziraphale was making noises like that and holding him like he’d never let go.

When their tongues met, Crowley thought it might be enough to start a fusion reaction going right there in his chest, only his arms tightened around Aziraphale at the feeling, and Aziraphale sighed and settled against him and deepened the kiss, and _that_ was what would start a fusion reaction in Crowley’s chest. He was utterly dazed with it by the time Aziraphale turned his face and began kissing his way down Crowley’s jaw to his throat, then down his throat to his collarbone. He was, Crowley realized distantly, doing about the same thing Crowley had done to him, only a million times better, because Crowley was about ready to spontaneously combust with it where Aziraphale had only gone stiff and frightened at it.

Aziraphale paused at the extremity of Crowley’s robe, its neck permitting him to go no further. 

“How would we deal with this, if we were really doing… this?” he asked, voice soft as the night wind over sand, soft as ethereal feathers in the dark, soft as those curls under Crowley’s fingers.

“You’d get a hand on the hem, ruck it up a bit at a time, and then we’d be so distracted by other things that one of us would pull it over my head and chuck it into the bushes and then have to go looking for it once we were finished,” Crowley told him, seizing the opportunity to kiss that smooth brow. He plucked at the hem of Aziraphale’s robe. “Shall I show you?”

Aziraphale went still, lips thinning, and then glanced down at Crowley’s chest. “I’d rather… that is, can’t you just talk me through it?”

Crowley’s heart skipped a beat, the whole of it fluttering in his chest like a great moth distracted by firelight, and Aziraphale sat up. He drew a trembling breath, eyes never leaving Crowley’s, and reached back, hand curling around Crowley’s ankle just as Crowley’s had curled around his.

Crowley closed his eyes, tried not to throw his head back at it--not just that delicate, exploratory touch, but what it promised, where it would lead. Tried and failed, because a moment later Aziraphale’s hand was gone and his lips were back, fastened to the side of Crowley’s throat. Crowley couldn’t help reaching for Aziraphale’s plush ass with both hands at that, filling his palms with that gloriously lush corporation, fingers tracing the curve of it even as Aziraphale wriggled against him.

“Really, my dear,” Aziraphale scolded, his voice all warm breaths and gentle longing, the smell of him like a flower calling out for pollination, sweet and heady and impossible to think through.

“I’m not the one running around in a corporation like a second moon, angel,” Crowley told him, shivering as Aziraphale’s lips claimed another inch of his throat. “So blessed bright and beautiful and untouchable, reflecting every scrap of light thrown at you when it’s most needed--”

Aziraphale cut him off with another kiss, this one a quick peck of a thing compared to the soul-singed second one, a soft-jawed press of lips and then gone again. He pulled Crowley’s robe up, fingertips skating over his shin only to linger on his bent knee, and Crowley felt the air on his bare skin, hair prickling at it. He wanted to roll Aziraphale onto his back and bury his head between those pillowy thighs, wanted to…

He slipped his hand between them, cupping Aziraphale’s quim gently through his robe, and Aziraphale’s hand tightened on Crowley’s knee as he arched back, keening and wings spread wide. He withdrew his hand just as gently, and Aziraphale slumped down, the retina-scorching corona of his halo collapsing back into the general glow of him. 

“I--you--” Aziraphale panted and stared around as if he wasn’t sure what had just happened, and Crowley couldn’t help but drink in the sight of him. When Aziraphale finally focused again, it was on Crowley’s mouth. “Is that normally… how that goes?”

Crowley schooled his expression into seriousness. “Normally we’d be cuddling or kissing, too, but since I’ve already had my ki--”

Aziraphale bent down quick as a shooting star, pressing his lips to Crowley’s, and Crowley pressed his hand to Aziraphale’s quim in turn. The angel twitched at it, kiss going hot and hungry even as his hands bunched in the front of Crowley’s robe, and Crowley reached up with his other hand to stroke that sensitive spot between the angel’s shoulder blades. Crowley kneaded carefully at that unspeakably soft flesh, caressing the folds and rubbing at the mound of it as best he could through the obstacle of the fabric, and in spite of it all Aziraphale shuddered, wings fluttering helplessly as he cried out, and then shuddered again.

Aziraphale settled heavily onto him, panting against Crowley’s skin, and Crowley let his fingers run languidly through that goose-down hair and over that lovely back.

“Tell me again?” Aziraphale asked after a moment, his voice unbearably mellow, caught somewhere between desire and sleep. “How pretty you find me?”

Crowley laughed softly and lifted his head to kiss the angel’s temple. “Your wings in the moonlight remind me of what it is to hear the pulsars sing, angel. The first time I saw you hitch up your robe to wade into the water, I thought I was literally going to discorporate. Even when I know you’re only coming to nag at me about something, I can’t help but smile when I see your shadow on the sand. I’ve wanted to touch your glorious hair since the moment I saw you, and actually getting to touch it hasn’t dampened the urge one bit.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale pushed himself up and looked down at Crowley, eyes wide.

Crowley wrinkled his nose. “Too much? Not what you were thinking?”

“I… Oh!” His eyes focused on Crowley’s robe instead of Crowley’s face, and the demon followed his gaze. “I _am_ sorry, Crowley, I didn’t mean…”

“Suppose that’s one way to do it,” Crowley said, snorting at the mess Aziraphale’s clenched fingers had made of the cloth. “’s all right, angel. Figured I’d be miracling a few bits back together after all this, anyway.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale’s expression shaded back into interest, lips drawing into a tidy pink cupid’s bow. “Well, in that case...”

He finished the tear with barely more than a tug, opening the robe the rest of the way to Crowley’s navel, and if it hadn’t been for the anchoring weight of Aziraphale still resting on his hips, resisting the urge to go scuttling into the water at that casual strength would have been a near thing. Aziraphale’s hands on his bare waist was another shock to the system, for all that his touch was light and undemanding, delicate and exploratory--it still made a power Crowley had forgotten spiral down his spine and crash out through the rest of his nervous system like a flash flood.

Aziraphale braced one gentle hand on his sternum and bent to kiss his now-exposed chest, lips like feathers brushing over his ribs. “Your heart is beating so fast, my dear.”

“Not really how I expected the rest of the afternoon to go,” Crowley confessed.

Aziraphale paused to examine Crowley’s nipple. “You expected to be laughing into your sleeve about me being afraid of you.”

“I expected you to have either stomped off and agreed to drop it for good or, preferably, to be sleeping off a paroxysm or ten in a generous patch of shade, having accepted once and for all that sex is fun,” Crowley told him, shivering. Aziraphale’s hands on his skin were like ice, like a brand, light as a breath and heavy as if they’d forged him out of a white dwarf, and Crowley didn’t know whether to fight his way free of it or beg him never to stop. How long had it been since someone had touched him like this?

 _Never, no one’s ever, not like_ this _, not the way he’s doing it._

Crowley couldn’t remember the last time someone had so much as leaned on him without the roiling potential for it to turn into some kind of fucking _thing_ , and here was Aziraphale ripping off his robe and kissing him and stroking his hair. It was awful and wonderful and--

“You can have more than one?” Aziraphale asked, perking up, and Crowley could almost see his halo flickering brighter.

“Depends on what you’ve got, I suppose. Cocks seem to be out of commission for a bit afterwards, though I think the humans are working on a way around that. A quim, though…” Crowley slid his fingers gently over Aziraphale’s folds and was rewarded with a delicious quiver, and his cock ached and twitched against his robe. He was going to embarrass himself, if the angel kept this up. “Made of sterner stuff.”

“Why’ve you given yourself these?” Aziraphale asked, his voice gone low and tender again, hips tilting to press his quim harder against Crowley’s hand even as his eyes lingered on Crowley’s nipples.

“It’s the style, innit?” Crowley asked, chuckling. Precious, artless glutton, always delighted with whatever he was given and then fluttering after the next pleasure like a butterfly. Hardly seemed to matter if it was a bit of fruit or a pretty rock or a little bird singing its heart out--if it was nice, Aziraphale would be delighted with it. What that archangel had been thinking, filling his head full of horrible nonsense about sex, Crowley hadn’t the foggiest.

“It’s just that, if you’ve been running around with a… a member, then…”

“Adam’s got them too, you know,” Crowley pointed out. “Standard issue, for humans.”

Aziraphale brushed his fingers over them, light and gentle with those soft fingertips of his, and Crowley whimpered and bucked, the liquid _need_ of it pooling low in his belly and scorching at his flesh.

“Oh!” Aziraphale looked down at him, cheeks pink and eyes wide. He rocked back, then blinked as Crowley’s cock rubbed insistently against the swell of his ass. “Oh, my word.”

He fit his hands against Crowley’s ribs as if measuring them to his fingers, eyes trailing down the faint sprinkling of red-gold hair that led from Crowley’s chest to his hips.

“I want to see you, Crowley. If I… if I move, you’ll stay where you are, won’t you? You won’t run away?”

“When have I ever run from anything, angel?” Crowley demanded, and Aziraphale pursed his lips, all straitlaced angelic disapproval of such a blatant lie, as if his quim wasn’t burning and luscious against Crowley’s fingers.

“Whenever someone tries to hold you to account, or scold you, or be kind to you, or do something nice for you--”

“Psht.” Crowley wriggled irritably. It wasn’t like that at all, and the angel knew it.

“Then you’ll stay?” Aziraphale asked again.

Crowley swallowed, and Aziraphale lifted himself slowly, pulling Crowley’s robe open until the cloth began to give again. Crowley shivered at the air on his skin, at the angel’s eyes on his form, at the pulsing ache at the root of him. Aziraphale’s hands were on his knees, sliding down his thighs, and he could lose himself in just this, Aziraphale’s hands gentle on that thin skin. Then Aziraphale’s hand closed around his cock, hesitant and questioning and careful, and Crowley bucked up against him and cried out, every last brain cell he had left spilling all over the angel’s hand.

He came back to himself slowly and found Aziraphale staring wide-eyed, robes disheveled, hair mussed, open hand smeared with come.

“Angel,” Crowley croaked. _Apologize, idiot. Say something, he’s about to run screaming for the hills--_

“Was that a paroxysm?” Aziraphale asked.

“Uh. Yeah.” 

Crowley stirred, skin feeling too tight and too warm and he just wanted to lie there and luxuriate in it but Aziraphale was _looking_ at him like that and he needed to cover himself and--

Aziraphale’s wings flared, and he put his other hand on Crowley’s belly, splayed out and gentle but inarguable in its intent all the same, and Crowley went still.

“I… caused it?” he asked quietly. “Just by touching you?”

“Uh. Dunno that there’s any ‘just’ about you touching me, but yeah.” Crowley nodded, then let his muscles go loose like they wanted. He could drag the angel against him, wrap thick coils around that lush form, sleep for ages with Aziraphale safe in his embrace. “You caused it, all right.”

“Can I hold you? I mean, it won’t… hurt anything, will it? Even though you just, ah, you’re out of--”

“You can hold me until the sun goes out, if you want,” Crowley said, reaching for him. Aziraphale gave him a shy smile that Crowley felt like a physical blow, rippling through him with the realization that Aziraphale really had thought he might say no, that… what? That the angel could be dismissed as easily as that?

Aziraphale scrubbed his hand off with a bit of sand and stretched out happily along Crowley’s side, wrapping his arms around Crowley’s ribs and holding him close. Crowley traced the curves of Aziraphale’s side, then tacked back up that voluptuous thigh.

“Mmm.” Aziraphale arched against him and bent his knee, giving Crowley room to explore properly. “You know, when you do that, it really doesn’t seem so unreasonable to… I mean, it’s still larger than it needs to be, and I can’t see how that was according to plan, but…”

He moaned sharply when Crowley pressed the pad of his thumb against Aziraphale’s clit, teasing it until Aziraphale buried his face in Crowley’s shoulder and whined.

“I could use my fingers,” Crowley offered, that ethereal form melting against his, and he took back every ridiculous escape plan he’d ever formulated. He’d have gone through the War a thousand times, for this. “If that seems slightly more reasonable?”

“Ah!” Aziraphale shuddered as Crowley circled his entrance, then traced the length of his labia. “Maybe… just the… ah! The one?”

Crowley wriggled down so that he could use both hands, carefully giving Aziraphale the one finger he’d asked for without letting up on everything that had made him want it in the first place. It was marvellous, feeling the wet heat of him, the clench and shiver of that glorious body from the inside, and Aziraphale bucked against him.

“Maybe,” he breathed, after a few minutes, “maybe another wouldn’t hurt?”

“Tell me if it does,” Crowley said, kissing his chest.

It was the third finger, it turned out, that pushed Aziraphale over the edge again, leg thrown over Crowley’s hip and arms tight around Crowley’s chest and those soft, sweet, delicious moans echoing in Crowley’s ears. Crowley wiped his hands off on the remains of his robe and slithered up to kiss those plump lips, and Aziraphale sighed, lashes fluttering.

“You said something about sleeping it off in the shade?” he asked.

“Common side effect of coming,” Crowley told him, stroking his hair. Aziraphale nestled against him, cheek soft as dandelion fluff against Crowley’s shoulder. “Shall we take a nap together, then?”

“Mmm.” Aziraphale snapped his fingers, and a thick white cloud popped into being, drifting into place above them. The shadow that fell across the oasis banished the growing heat of the day, and Crowley almost laughed at it. Frivolous miracles, indeed. The angel’s lips moved against his skin. “Was that one of yours?”

“Was what one of mine?” Crowley asked, pleasure-fuzzed brain failing him.

“The sun,” Aziraphale murmured. “Did you make it?”

“Nah. Senior team handled that one. Had to get it just so to make it work with the flora and the fauna and all that, and I was always going too hard on the carbon and mucking around pairing them up.” Crowley had to admit they’d nailed it. Hard not to, with Herself breathing down their necks, but still. Every last bit of it, absolutely to spec. “She’d never’ve let me within a hundred lightyears of the sun.”

“You’ll have to show me one of yours, then,” Aziraphale said, yawning. Crowley cradled him close and kissed his brow again, delighted by the fine hair at the edge of it.

“Hard to pick out from this distance, but if you want,” Crowley said, smiling. “Once it gets dark.”

“I’d like that.” Aziraphale yawned again, a less delicate thing this time, and the weight resting against Crowley’s flesh took on a heaviness that hadn’t been there before. It felt like a release, like an angel trusting him. Crowley blinked at it, a sudden, scrambling panic kicking him in the ribs at that looming ruin, and Aziraphale’s arms tightened ever so slightly. “You really won’t run away, will you? You’ll stay?”

Crowley swallowed. Aziraphale showed no sign of letting go in any case, but still. “I’ll stay as long as I can, angel. I promise that much.”

Aziraphale exhaled happily at that, closed his eyes, and lapsed into a doze. Crowley watched him, wondering how he’d gotten himself here--the best place imaginable, the last place he deserved to be--and then finally let sleep claim him as well.


End file.
